Sara Miner Literature of Comics

This week I read Batman The Dark Knight Returns, about Batman's return to crime fighting to stop the Mutant Gang and Harvey Dent, who escapes the hospital. The Joker had been in a mental institution and sort of laying low with no real purpose for being a criminal while Batman was no longer fighting crime. However with Batman coming back to the scene with passion to fight the Mutant Gang, Joker comes back too. Something that really caught my attention while reading this was how aging and being out of the crime fighting scene has put Batman at a disadvantage. He gets injured, makes mistakes and openly admits at times that he's not up with the new technology. It makes him much more relatable than other superheroes because it shows that he too is just a human. Another thing I really liked is that not only is Robin a young and not overly sexualized female, but Batman openly depends on her and relies on her to make up for his shortcomings. The only thing that I thought was strange in

This week I read My Favorite Thing is Monsters, this isn't a comic I'm particularly a fan of. It's too wordy so it doesn't make me really want to read everything and I ended up mostly just paying attention to the images, which I also don't really like very much. My first impression of this comic was that the art just looks like someone in high school that can draw well based off of natural talent and no real instruction made it. I also think that it being made on notebook paper, while yes it does make it unique and more memorable, makes it look more unprofessional and sloppy.

I read Alec "The Years Have Pants" (A Life-Sized Omnibus) this week, mostly the weird name attracted me at first. The whole comic is a series of chapters written at different times over the course of a few years, the story being about two guys named Danny Grey and Alec MacGarry going through their lives. Through the story the art style stays semi-consistent, only changing in the middle of the story, where almost all of the panels lose their borders and become very rough and sketchy. This is symbolic to me of a dark and mentally messy part of Alec's life that's being shown. I didn't completely finish the story because it's so long, being 641 pages, but I read enough to understand that neither Alec nor Danny are mentally healthy people and they feed off of each other the whole time.

Most likely like a lot of people at this school do, I read a lot of manga on a daily basis. Before I found manga and anime, I was a big comic book fan but I found something a bit more feminine to most of the manga I found so I liked it better. Most of the time I would just read shojo and romance manga, but that lead to watching more serious anime and eventually leading to reading the manga that go along with the anime. Growing up reading manga it's always been very interesting to see how manga can be translated into anime and how it has inspired japanese games and pop culture.

This week I read  Moebius Stories from Heavy Metal, a collection of different short stories that are seemingly all  from the same universe, but I'm not so sure about it because none of the stories are really comprehensible to me.  Something that I didn't enjoy when I was reading is the order the stories were put in. Going from a colorful and detailed style to an extremely minimalistic black and white story was too jarring and they didn't compliment each other well at all.

For this week I read through Andre the Giant, I thought the juxtaposition between the soft and round style of illustration they used and the toughness of the lives and personalities of the wrestlers was interesting. In the beginning when Hulk Hogan was doing the interview and he said that Andre was a nice guy considering what he had to deal with, I really don't agree after seeing everything that he did throughout the story. When he wasn't on stage, all he ever did was get drunk. And when he did have conversations with people he was either so standoffish that they would start fighting or it was talking about women. He wasn't involved in his child's life and he had to ask people wether they were friends or not, that doesn't strike me as him being a very good person.